Pages

menu-classic

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” (Carl Rogers)

Friday, 12 October 2012

70:20:10 is a Person-Centred Approach to Learning

As part of my various researches into Person-Centred education and, of late, brain research, I encountered the idea of 70:20:10, which attempts to show that we learn more from experience than from formal education. The model works like this:

70% of learning is from on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving.

20% from human relationships, networks, and feedback.

10% from courses and reading.

Of course the figures are artificial (just like 64.632% of statistics are made up on the spot) but I think the model has some traction because many people feel that it is probably about right from their own experience - and I see the model as very Person-Centred because it centrally recognises the importance of context in experiential learning processes. "How to manage formal learning?" is the same question Carl Rogers addressed and he came to the same conclusion: you can't! What you do is set a positive and encouraging emotional climate, provide resources (taking care of the channel, the time and the resource) and stand back to allow learning to take place, for the learners' internal drive to growth to unfold...

Here's a very useful white paper from DeakinPrime about the model and Charles Jennings has created an utterly fantastic video explaining the model with real clarity - worth 5 minutes of anybody's time: